Let this one remain
by ElizabethsEcho
Summary: After the war, Narcissa reflects.


**Let this one remain**

The room bleeds memories.

Memories drip from the ceiling and flow down the walls. They blossom on the floor and diffuse across the air. They drain out as if from a wound, unstaunched, unbandaged, unhealed, saturating the whole place. Even its occupant seems to be a mere half-formed ghost, a spectral shadow of yesterday. She does not belong in this new, this better world, Narcissa thinks, with a cynical twinge of pain. What is she but the dregs of an old and dying race, a leftover from another time?

It has been hard for her to adjust to a peacetime existence, hard to believe that the Dark Lord is finally vanquished after having lived in his shadow for most of her life and harder still to pull herself back to reality after years spent in a dissociative trance. For so long, she watched the doomed shipwreck that was the second war through the eyes of a spectator, with the same cool detachment she might have had if viewing a rather dull play or a session of the Wizengamot. It's not me. It's not my son. It's not my sister. This has nothing to do with any of us. Now, the challenge is to recover something, anything, of that hollow, broken shell of a person and, if it is possible, learn to live again.

But what life is there for her? A long road lies ahead before society is finally purged of prejudice and intolerance and bigotry, a road of demolishing all that was there before, of removing the deep, ingrained foundations that have festered and rotted for centuries and rebuilding new ones from scratch with broken tools. Yet she can sense that something rare and beautiful is emerging from the ashes of their war-harrowed world. There will be no more children like her, she is certain. No longer will blood and name hold any distinction or power rest solely in the hands of a few privileged elite. A part of her cannot help but be sad that the old system has been so completely destroyed. It was great once, back in the glory days of the Blacks when they reigned supreme and undisputed over all other families. She remembers the balls, the dinner parties, the confidence of knowing that you were absolutely unassailable and could not be toppled. And the darkness too, the ruins that lay crumbling beneath the facade. With hindsight, she realises that their way of life was always doomed to come to an end. For Draco's sake, she is glad.

Draco. Her one reason for living, the one person who has brought her through all this. He is healing, slowly. His face, so wretched and gaunt, has started to fill out and regain its colour, and his eyes are slowly losing that haggard, desperately broken expression that so haunted her in the last few months of the war. A few days ago, she heard him laugh, truly laugh, for the first time in ages, and it gave her hope that perhaps something could be salvaged of his vanished youth. But he is not a little boy any more. The war has marked him irrevocably, as it has her. He still cries out for her in the night sometimes, his sleep troubled by awful visions of scenes that no child should ever have to witness. And she has seen the scar that will forever brand his left forearm, a cruel taunt from a past that refuses to leave him.

Deep down, she blames herself. She should have said something, done something, got him out of that hellhole while there was still hope. If it wasn't for Bella—

God, Bella. The newspapers have slandered her, as could only be expected. A wicked woman, they proclaim. Savage. Depraved. Heartless. But they don't understand! Bella's crime was not that she was incapable of love, but that she was consumed by it. It was her love that led her to commit dreadful, unspeakable atrocities, in love's name that she renounced all compassion or empathy, for love's sake that she slaughtered her own flesh and blood, and in the end it was love that destroyed her. Yet even then, when all else was lost, something of the old Bella remained. Cissy remembers one day, perhaps a week before the battle, when Bella flung her arms around her and held her tight and whispered that she was scared, that her Lord was displeased and, oh Cissy, what should she do to regain his favour and get him to notice her again. In that moment, the order seemed to have been reversed; no longer was she the frightened child who needed to be protected and Bella the older sister offering that protection. It was a stark reminder of all that had changed- her once proud sister, so wild and so bright, reduced to a pitiful, shattered wreck.

Soon afterwards, she had died a martyr, as she must always have wanted. But hers was not so much the glorious end of a warrior as a longed-for release at the bitter conclusion to a bloody war. Still, Cissy hopes that in the last minutes of his existence the Dark Lord felt just a fraction of the passion and the devotion that Bella had held for him, that he felt something as close to grief as he was capable of feeling. _She_ certainly grieves, if she is the only one who does, though in her heart of hearts she admits that Molly Weasley was justified in killing her sister. What mother would not do that for their children? She grieves, in spite of thinking sometimes that she ought not to, not even for the girl that Bella used to be. It is wrong, an insult to all those who have suffered at her hands, to the Longbottoms and Hermione Granger and Dobby, a free elf, whom she never managed to apologise to for years of disgraceful treatment. And Sirius, oh God, Sirius. But Bella never meant to kill him. She confessed that to her, her face pale and wraithlike. _I did a bad thing, Cissy. I killed him. Where's he gone? Can't he come back? But my Lord says I was right, that it was good to prune the tree. Was I right, Cissy?_ And she mustn't forget Andy, upon whom Bella inflicted the worst vengeance possible.

It was in the Great Hall in the aftermath of the battle, in the first shell-shocked silence, that she saw Andy for the first time since she had run away with that mudblood- no, muggleborn- Tonks. She herself was kneeling over Bella's stiff, still body, in the process of closing shut her wild, wild eyes with their horrified, scornful expression, when her sister approached her, her walk heavy, looking older than her forty-five years. She stopped short, and clutched her hand to her head.

"Oh God. Oh no. Not Bella. Not her," she groaned, sounding wretchedly pained, as if she was about to break down completely. Then, catching sight of Cissy, a firm resolve entered her eyes. Speaking in the same tone she might have used if talking to a stranger, "She died during the battle, did she?"

"Yes. Yes she did."

"Fought till the end?"

"Of course. She'd never give up without a fight." Involuntarily, Cissy's gaze turned towards her niece, who lay a few rows away, still with her shock of pink hair, a last gesture of defiance even in death.

Andy noticed.

"You don't mean- you can't mean- she- she killed Nymphadora?" she rasped. Something cracked.

Narcissa nodded, her eyes meeting Andy's hollow, despairing ones. She had been there, had witnessed Bella's triumphant, victorious laugh as she had cornered her victim, her euphoria at finally having met the Dark Lord's ultimatum. Helpless, paralysed, too cowardly to intervene, she had watched on, right to the bloody end. Bella had never done anything by halves, and in the force of her hatred, she certainly spared Nymphadora no pains. Death had come as a mercy; the girl had fallen back on the hard floor of the hall with a thud, limp as a marionette, her limbs brutally twisted. "Got what you wanted at last, auntie Bella?" she had said, every word an effort to force out, and Bella had laughed again, that manic, high, crazy laugh that Azkaban had given her.

"She did? I should have known!" Andy exclaimed, her face impossibly contorted in grief. She slumped to the floor, lifeless as a ragdoll or a corpse. "I should never have let her go!"

Narcissa shifted closer.

"But she would insist," she continued, lifting her eyes to look across the hall. "She made me take baby Teddy, said she'd be back in no time. And look what happened!"

After a second's pause, Cissy rested a tentative hand on her sister's shoulder.

"She's dead!" Andy raised her voice, hardly caring if everyone heard her, probably not even realising that there were others in the room. "Dead and gone now! I always knew that Bellatrix was after her. I suppose she wanted to get back at me, wanted to purge the noble and most inbred house of Black of its impurities. Well, her revenge is complete indeed! First Cissy, then she leads Reggie into the dark and he falls, then she _slaughters_ Sirius and after that my husband. And now she has taken my daughter too, the one person that I had left. I don't understand! How could you do that to your own sister? How could you destroy her life just as you destroyed yours? I can't believe it's come to this!"

She was almost screaming now, on the verge of collapse. "Oh God, Nymphadora! I wish I could tell her how sorry I am for every time I was angry at her! That I love her and I don't care how clumsy she is or what colour her hair is! That I was wrong about Lupin and she's perfectly free to love whoever she chooses! That I've been a terrible mother and she deserves someone far, far better than me for a parent."

That did it. Whatever Andy had done in the past, however much Narcissa had viewed her actions as a betrayal, however long they had gone without speaking, it didn't matter. The silence and distance of twenty-five years all shattered in an instant. Narcissa engulfed her sister in her arms, wrapped her close and tight and bore the first turbulent wave of her grief with her, and all the ones that followed afterwards. She could do no less. Here was a mother who had just lost her daughter, someone who had no one and nothing to hold on to. It was up to her to provide what little relief she could, her duty to act as an anchor in the storm.

In the months that followed, there was plenty of time for conversation, for catching up and filling each other in on all the missed memories. At first, these discussions were stilted and awkward, neither of them wanting to delve too deep into the past or bring up subjects that were best forgotten. But gradually, they regained their old ease around each other, if their relationship could never be what it once was. Andy told her about Ted, her brother-in-law, and how they had fallen in love while patrolling corridors on prefect duty. She learned of Nymphadora, the niece she never knew, of what a livewire she was, always causing havoc, of how her favourite trick at Hogwarts was to transform into one of the teachers when she was caught out after curfew, and how from the age of two or three she had worn her hair obstinately short and pink and spiky, raising some concerns among the neighbours. She found out about Sirius and what had befallen him after he had staggered out of Grimmauld Place into the night, how he would doubtless have died without Andy's intervention. And, in turn, she told Andy of mother and father and Reggie and Lucius and Draco and Bella, relieved to unburden the ghosts of the past on someone willing to listen.

They buried their dead as well; a makeshift funeral held at the secret spot, lacking in two of the bodies. Three tombstones lie there now next to the old willow tree:

 _Regulus Black_

 _1961-1979_

 _Not waving but drowning. He proved himself in the end._

 _Sirius Black_

 _1959-1996_

 _Keep on burning brightly, now that you are free._

 _Bellatrix Black_

 _1951-1998_

 _I broke every promise that I made. I forgive you sister._

On some days, if she listens carefully, she can hear the soft gurgling of the stream and the wooden swing creaking in the wind. And if she lingers awhile, she swears she can make out the ghosts of old laughs, quiet whispers on the breeze which never really die. For, in another time, not so long ago, children played here.


End file.
